Juiced 2

Thursday, 27 December 2007 00:00

I thought the PSP would be great for racing games with it's decent sized screen, graphics capabilities and it's portability, but I just can't seem to play them that long. After a while, my fingers and eyes start to ache and I think it comes down to using the analogue stick too much.

Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights looks and plays rather good, so once the cool intro sequence is over, you get to try it out before delving into the main game .. or I thought so until there didn't seem to be a 'quickplay' option.

It turns out that you can 'practice' in the Driver DNA Lab section of the game, but what this also does is figure out what kind of a driver you are using parameters and stuff. You can either set up a custom race of which you can Drift Solo or try the other events such as Circuit Race that allows you to race on any track in any location and against up to five AI rivals.

The Career mode is obviously where it all happens, so after a quite long loading time, you get to do an initiation race. You're given a brief introduction to other racers, one of which you're expected to make a bet with and then off you go, it's pretty easy to win since you're just starting out and the AI isn't that hot yet. If you can't win the first race, you might as well give up now.

Once you've got your new motor, you get the chance to make it look pretty and tweak some settings and there's also the ability to unlock perfromance upgrades. Except, once you've 'unlocked' them, you still need to pay for the upgrade. Taking on challenges allow you to unlock stuff, complete the challenge, get new stuff, winner.

The premise of career mode is simple, start as a Rookie, win races and challenges to progress through the ranks, et voila. One thing I like about racing games is that they usually have a replay option at the end where you can watch the race and see how you did, I'm not sure what happened, but I left the replay playing for a while and for some reason, the cars started going backwards. Anyway, once you've won and completed any challenges such as get 3rd place or above or get 3 seconds of air, you move on and proceed until you reach the next rank and so on.

The controls are nice and easy, the only thing that stops you playing for a prolonged period of time is the framerate. If you don't want your eyes to go fuzzy and blurred, it's best to take a break after EVERY race/event or you'll end up feeling too tired to play. Loading times are quite slow and that's a bit off-putting due to the nature of the game, you can't really get an adrenaline-pumping sensation when you're waiting around a minute for it to load up.

As a racing game fan, I quite liked it and despite the loading times and framerate, it was rather enjoyable. One of the things I'm not really a fan of is the gambling side of racing games, that's probably because Im not a gambling type of person and therefore, don't really want to see that kind of thing in games like this.

If you're a fan of this genre and want something pretty decent to play on the PSP, I'd say it's worth checking out as it's something that will pass the time away and last for more than four battery charges.

7.8